I have a DV footage I filmed and then captured using Premiere Elements 8. The footage looks good for what it is, a recording of an instructor's lecture.

The strange part comes when its time to 'Share' from Premiere. When sharing my movie clips I get a serious amount of degradation at all levels of compression. I've found one compression setting which appears to be almost a magic bullet; its not perfect but its close.

My output target is:

460x380

346 kbps

Using On2 Vp6

The weird thing is how terrible the output looks.

Conversely if I take the same footage and run it through Adobe Flash CS3 Video Encoder, and make the same adjustments and encode here it looks pratically stellar, using all the same compression settings. The main remaining issue if I were to just use encoder is the audio, which I can't edit with encoder. I know its possible to use the audio editing capabilities of Premiere, render out a new .Avi, then encode it; but with all the control afforded by Premiere this shouldn't be necessary.

If anyone has a suggestion as to how I can take care of this, or perhaps what I might be doing wrong, I'm all electronic ears!

The dimension of the file isn't all that big, but as you said Encoder and Premiere should be using the same programming to carry out the same conversion.

The problem is that with identical output settings and source footage I get drastically different output. There maybe another program setting in Premiere I have set wrong or a mistake I've made. But the output of both programs when set the same SHOULD look the same. They don't.

Besides, reducing the dimensions of the footage should increase the relative resolution not decrease it. I'm not expecting everything to carry over, but there's a pretty big gap between what Encoder outputs and what Premiere outputs, and the disparity is the problem.